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The Golden Years
You don’t know how to use the phones.
Everyone mumbles on TV.
A life’s work coded in your bones
Is so much ancient history.
You look and people aren’t there.
You hobble where you’d like to run.
You always have a pain somewhere.
A good day’s when there’s only one.
The smoothest sidewalk is too rough.
Sometimes you barely taste your food.
It gets hard to get hard enough
Even when you’re in the mood.
But all that’s been purloined away
Is balanced by one saving bit,
That there are more things every day
About which you don’t give a shit.
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Michael Palma is the author several volumes of poetry, including A Fortune in Gold and Begin in Gladness. His newest collection, Local Colors, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press. He has also published Faithful in My Fashion: Essays on the Translation of Poetry. Among his more than twenty translations of Italian poets is a fully rhymed Divine Comedy, issued by Liveright in 2024. He lives in Vermont.
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Man on telephone, late 19th–early 20th Century